What Do We Ask of Eurocommunism?

A political question cannot be answered by a philosophical definition. Leszek Kolakowski has decided, to his own satisfaction, that Communists are Communists are Communists, an insight that he derives from reading their texts. For him, the criteria for their conversion to democracy would be that they repudiate certain texts and make certain declarations on the nature of the Soviet Union. (He notes, however, that “Berlinguer has no illusions as to what the Soviet system actually is.”) In his catholic language, he asks 39 them “to consummate both the heresy and the schism.” As though Catholic princes had not fought the Pope with as much ardor as Protestants! As though the “schism” between Peking and Mosc...